The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DelilloRead
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the shift in cultural influence from artists to those who employ violence.
In this quote, Don Delillo suggests that artists once had the power to influence the culture's inner life and emotions through their art. However, he observes a troubling shift where this influence has been overshadowed by destructive forces, such as bomb-makers and gunmen, highlighting a loss of the artist's role in shaping society's values and narratives.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of artists in modern society.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. β¨He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way heβs carrying a gun. β¨This is one of the essential images in American mythology.
There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts.
It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures
I absolutely adore and idolise women. All women. I think they are all amazing. The female musicians I've met have been far more inspiring than the male ones. Women tend to be much more creative and ambitious. I think I may have been a woman in a past life.
Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.
All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.
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